North Plains Acquires Xinet

DAM vendor consolidation at the enterprise end of the market continues with today’s announcement from one of our featured vendors, North Plains that they are acquiring competitor, Xinet:

“Through this acquisition, North Plains leverages Xinet’s best-in-class technology for file-based management of WIP assets as well as its success serving departments and creative work groups, and its global partner network. The acquisition extends North Plains’ already-established leading role in the DAM market providing industry-best database-centric asset management, particularly for enterprise organizations, publishers, media and entertainment and other Fortune 1000 companies that need to globally distribute their digital media to multiple agencies, partners, retail outlets and consumers.” [Read More]

The merging of many of the enterprise players mirrors similar trends in the ECM sector over the last few years. Xinet were historically stronger in the print/pre-press market and they have many long-term customers from that industry – which will no doubt be one of the major reasons for the completion of this transaction.

In general, such corporate manoeuvring is bad news for enterprise software customers and usually results in one or more product lines being quietly dumped, leaving the existing users to either cough up for a new system or find a way to support what they have themselves (not an easy proposition for closed source software). That said, from my own limited recent exposure to Xinet’s DAM products, they seemed to have fallen behind the innovation curve quite a lot and a merger with North Plains could potentially extend the useful life of their products and also give their customers a more straightforward upgrade path.